Kurtis Alexander

A Canadian mining company is asking for approval to reactivate the abandoned...

Federal regulators have agreed to decommission four dams in Northern California and...

Runoff from the immense Sierra snowpack continues to pour into Tulare Lake, but...

UPDATE: The race to prevent a wildlife disaster at California’s revived Tulare Lake Tulare Lake, the historical body of freshwater that unexpectedly re-emerged in the San Joaquin Valley with the winter deluge, may have reached its peak size this week: about 178 square miles or nearly the size of Lake Tahoe, according to new state estimates. The revived lake came to life in March, flooding roads, farms and even homes, and has continued to grow as record snow from the nearby Sierra Nevada has melt…

UPDATE: Nation’s largest dam removal marks milestone: the freeing of a major California river A few miles south of the California-Oregon border, up a remote canyon on the Klamath River, the hum of heavy machinery marks the start of the largest dam removal project in U.S. history. Hundreds of workers and scores of trucks and wrecking vehicles last month began dismantling a nearly century-old concrete dam, the first of four hydroelectric dams slated for demolition in an ambitious bid to restore on…

On the badly burned slopes of California’s southern Sierra Nevada, the National Park Service is about to launch one of the most ambitious efforts ever to piece back the wreckage of wildfire: rebuilding six groves of giant sequoia trees. Officials at Sequoia and Kings Canyon national parks say that with nearly a fifth of the world’s sequoias wiped out by flames since 2020, planting tens of thousands of sequoia seedlings is necessary to ensure a future for the planet’s largest, and now threatened,…

California wildlife officials were taken by surprise this week by the discovery of a new pack of wolves in the southern Sierra Nevada, hundreds of miles from where the rare and returning animals have recently been settling in the state. The revelation came after an unusual gray wolf sighting was reported last month in Sequoia National Forest, in Tulare County. Wildlife officials investigated the report and confirmed it as legitimate after finding tracks and other signs of the animal’s presence.…

For decades, California’s groundwater supplies have plummeted because of too much pumping. In some places, due to the heavy draws, the land above has collapsed, roads and bridges have buckled and communities have run out of water. But this year, after the historically wet winter, there was at least some reprieve for the state’s overburdened aquifers. Groundwater levels rose or were flat at the vast majority of wells tracked by the state, compared with last year, while groundwater levels dropped…

UPDATE: Gavin Newsom’s push to build biggest California reservoir in decades hit with lawsuit Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office is pressing forward with one of California’s most contentious water projects of the past half century, as it released a completed environmental review of the proposed 45-mile tunnel beneath the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta. The $16 billion undertaking, which has been pursued in various forms by previous administrations, is meant to move water more easily — and more secur…

MONTGOMERY CREEK, Shasta County — In the sprawling green hills of California’s far north, where the politics run red and rowdy, a new state law designed to clear a path for climate-friendly energy projects is facing a tough debut. State officials are using their authority under the law, for the first time, to gain approval powers over a plan to build 48 giant wind turbines in Shasta County — powers typically held by local officials. In doing so, they’ve encountered not only opposition to the pro…

A plan to build the largest reservoir in California in decades, Sites Reservoir about 70 miles north of Sacramento, is being challenged as ecologically destructive and not worth the cost in a lawsuit filed by environmental groups Wednesday. The $4.5 billion project, which seeks to boost water supplies for drought-plagued cities and farms, was recently put on the fast track by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The suit, though, alleges the reservoir’s environmental impact report was insufficient, failing to add…

California’s largest greenhouse gas polluters, from power plants to oil refineries to chemical manufacturers, produced slightly fewer emissions last year than the previous year, federal data shows. But it’s still too much planet-warming gas to cut significantly into the problem of climate change, environmentalists say. Three of the five biggest carbon emitters in the state were in the Bay Area, according to the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2022 data on large polluting facilities. All three…

The nation’s largest dam-removal project is reaching a major milestone this month as work crews release the water behind three dams on the Klamath River, leaving the storied waterway in Northern California and southern Oregon to flow freely for the first time in a century. The drawdown of the reservoirs and the unleashing of the river, which began Thursday at the 189-foot-high Iron Gate Dam, is a necessary – and hugely transformative – step before the three hydroelectric facilities in the remote…

The long-dormant lake that roared to life in California’s San Joaquin Valley last winter, eventually swelling to nearly the size of Lake Tahoe, has all but disappeared. Almost a year after historic storms fueled its rebirth, Tulare Lake endures today only as several small stretches of standing water. The vast expanses of farms, roads and buildings unexpectedly engulfed by the lake ever since March, between Bakersfield and Fresno, have mostly resurfaced, albeit wet and very muddy. As of early thi…

POTTER VALLEY, Mendocino County — Nearly 120 years ago, when the West still hummed with gas lighting and horse-drawn wagons, a San Francisco man named W.W. Van Arsdale, once described by a local newspaper as uncharacteristically enterprising, set out to help rural Mendocino County find a bridge to the young 20th century. The entrepreneur, in a move that would forever change Northern California, bored a mile-long tunnel in a mountain near the county seat of Ukiah and piped water from the Eel Rive…

Despite pleas from farmers, California water regulators on Tuesday took the extraordinary step of assuming oversight of groundwater pumping in a swath of the state’s agricultural heartland, a first-of-its-kind move intended to shore up diminished groundwater reserves. The Tulare Lake subbasin, a hydrological region between Fresno and Bakersfield that is now officially on “probation,” has seen its aquifers run low, wells run dry and land sink as a result of overpumping. Some areas have dropped ne…

Diminished by decades of over-pumping, California’s groundwater reserves saw a huge influx of water last year, in some places the most in modern times, according to state data that offers the first detailed look at how aquifers fared during the state’s historically wet 2023. The bump was driven, in part, by deliberate efforts to recharge aquifers — the porous underground rock that holds water and accounts for about 40% of the state’s total water supply. The intentional water banking, or managed…